Local News

By THE BAKERSFIELD CALIFORNIAN

“Onion Field” killer Gregory Powell, who achieved notoriety and a life sentence in the fatal shooting of a Los Angeles police officer during a kidnapping, died Sunday of natural causes, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Powell, 79, was denied parole each of the 11 times he became eligible for it, the last time being Jan. 27, 2010, a CDCR news release said. Powell had terminal prostate cancer and was denied compassionate release in October of last year.

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In the March 9, 1963 incident that led to his incarceration, Powell and his partner, Jimmy Lee Smith, had been pulled over by two plain-clothes officers for making an illegal U-turn, according to the Associated Press. The two armed men disarmed the officers and drove them to an onion field near Bakersfield.

Wrongly believing that they had violated the federal kidnapping statute known as the "Lindbergh Law," and faced the death penalty if captured, Powell shot Officer Ian Campbell in the face, killing him, the AP reported.

Officer Karl Hettinger, however, ran as Powell fired at him and managed to escape to a farmhouse about four miles away, the CDCR news release said. Powell was arrested the night of the murder, and Smith the following day in a Bakersfield rooming house.

Both men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but appeals and a retrial stretched on for more than a decade, and their death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment after California's death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in 1972.

The case became the subject of the 1973 best-selling novel “The Onion Field” by Joseph Wambaugh, which was made into a movie in 1979.

Smith was paroled in 1982, the news release said, but he frequently was returned to prison on drug-related parole violations before dying of an apparent heart attack in a county jail in 2007 after being picked up for yet another parole violation.

Hettinger was haunted by that night and shunned by his colleagues, the AP reported. He left the force, went into the nursery business and later became a Kern County supervisor. He died in 1994 at age 59.

The two California Highway Patrol officers from Bakersfield who captured Powell told The Californian in July 2002 they weren’t interested in attending a parole hearing for Powell that was scheduled at the time.

The body of a large paddle-tailed rodent was found early Tuesday in the traffic lanes of southbound Mohawk Street north of Truxtun Avenue, suggesting Bakersfield's fabled bike path beaver -- scourge of local saplings -- may have died.

The lush grasses and sweeps of wildflowers cloak much of the damage to the small canyon in a blanket of ephemeral green. But Ellen Cypher and Erin Tennant can see it as they walk along a sandy route that has been churned into the bottom of the wash by motorcyclists and quad riders.

Even Kern County Supervisor Leticia Perez's self-serving, disingenuous and downright contemptuous ranting against a proposed ban of Piccolo Pete and ground flower-type fireworks wasn't nearly as stunning to me as Supervisor David Couch's silence and eventual vote against the ban.